Kevin Costner's The West

The west has always been america's fabled promised land,

a place where ordinary people

dreamed of carving their destiny on land of their own.

In the first half of the 19th century,

settlers seeking that dream

fueled a violent clash with native nations

protecting their way of life.

Then in 1848, California offers up a new kind of dream:

The chance to get rich without land, by finding gold.

New migrants flock west from every corner

of the country and globe,

but in this lawless land, for every man making a buck,

there are three men bent on stealing it.

That's doubly true for Mexican outlaw,

Joaquin murrieta.

He came to California seeking a fortune

and found his calling as a common criminal.

His life and death forged a legend

inspiring fictional heroes like Zorro and django.

His story begins with a fleck of gold.

People live on myths,

and the myths that really stick

in the American experience are the myths of the west.

The mountains were taller.

The deserts were harsher.

The snows were deeper.

The American west conjures

wonder, possibility, opportunity.

The figure of the mountain man.

Notorious outlaws.

The cowboy.

The discovery of gold in California.

This train of wagons trailing across the prairie.

Everybody has a reason for wanting this land.

But most of that land was already occupied.

We have been residents for more than 10,000 years.

But this is a clash of two different ways

of seeing life itself.

Fighting for the future of your homeland on the one side,

and fighting for the destiny of the new republic

on the other side.

The history of the west is a creation story.

It's the creation of what we think of as modern america.

The west is a place where anything is possible.

It is the essence of the American dream.

The core of this is, what are we to be as a nation?

The reckoning is coming.

The west is this canvas

on which American dreams become larger than life.

From the earliest days of independence,

the United States has been looking west.

By the mid 1840s,

thousands of Americans have crossed the rockies

and settled in Oregon country,

giving the nation a foothold on the pacific.

And in 1845, newly elected president James polk

has his sights set on securing the west coast.

That same year, the press coins a phrase

that captures the spirit of the age, "manifest destiny."

When you take that phrase apart, "manifest destiny",

it's saying on the one hand, "destiny," this is inevitable,

because these are a superior people

moving into this country.

And "manifest," that is just obvious.

Anyone who looks at this will see

the inferiority of those whom they are conquering.

That's the way it was seen.

That's the way American expansion was justified.

James k. Polk made a pledge,

that if he's president of the United States,

that he was going to resolve our border issues

both in the pacific northwest and on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Within a year of polk's election,

the U.S. turns the republic of Texas into its 28th state.

Mexico is powerless to stop its former province

from joining the union, and polk wants more.

The motivation for the U.S.

Behind the Mexican war primarily

is this desire to fulfill manifest destiny.

It had their eye on this territory for a long time,

and they were intent on taking it by any means necessary.

The Mexican-American war is a naked land grab.

It's caused by the demand for more land.

The treaty of Guadalupe hidalgo

ends the Mexican-American war,

and formally cedes what is a third

or more of northern Mexico to the United States.

In 1848, the united states gains an additional

525,000 square miles of territory,

land that will eventually be known as Utah, Arizona,

Nevada, Colorado, and new Mexico.

But the greatest prize is California.

California has great natural ports,

monterey, and in San Francisco, and near San Diego.

America wants very much to have a trade with Asia,

and so there is a huge desire to have

that access to the pacific.

The people who negotiated and signed the treaty,

they had no idea that California all of a sudden

was worth a whole lot more than anybody had known.

At the time the treaty was signed,

gold had already been discovered in California,

but the news hadn't gone from California to Mexico City.

The discovery of gold in California happened within

200 hours of the signing

of the treaty of Guadalupe-hidalgo.

In other words, at the very moment

that we acquired the far west,

it began to be revealed

that this far west was the richest place on earth.

Individuals use that as somehow the justification

or the proof that that is exactly what god intended.

That god intended this land for you,

and then god rewards us with gold.

At the time, telegraph lines

and railroad tracks have not even

crossed the Mississippi river,

and news of the gold strike spreads by word of mouth,

first to nearby Oregon,

then by ships to ports in Mexico, Peru, Chile,

and China before finally reaching the east coast.

Gold was discovered in Sacramento in 1848,

but they really didn't get there until 1849.

That's why they're called the 49ers instead of the 48ers.

And there were only really two ways

you could get to California, sea passage,

if you had money for the sea passage.

The other way, to go overland

through the mountain passes,

incredibly arduous journeys either way,

but still they came.

That siren call of, "gold, gold, gold,"

rang through the newspapers, and they came in thousands.

Thousands of Americans

who once longed for their own piece of land to farm

now swap their plows for gold pans

and Blaze a trail to California.

The gold rush fundamentally alters the American dream.

Suddenly, there are these stories

about people striking it rich,

and in a day's work gaining a fortune

that would've been, in other cases, years of labor.

And then that just causes an explosion of immigration.

So in 1848, you have about 1,000 white people living

in what is the state of California.

Within two years, you hav 100,000.

Within another year, you have over 200,000.

California was once home

to around 300,000 indigenous people.

Then in the 1540s,

the Spanish came looking for the legendary city of gold,

known as El dorado.

They did not find it, but in the late 1700s,

they built a string of religious missions,

enslaved the local Indians,

and forced them to convert to catholicism.

Disease wiped out thousands of natives.

By the time Mexico gains its independence in 1821,

California has lost almost

half of its indigenous population,

and now, even Mexicans are rapidly

being outnumbered by the 49ers,

white Americans from the east ready to take the land.

The irony for the Mexicans who are there,

for the people who occupy those lands,

is that they're now deemed foreigners.

White Americans believed that because they won the war,

they're entitled to this gold.

It's a habit of the American frontier

that people arrive before the law gets there.

When that happens, there will be disputes about land.

And there are no rules.

People are staking claims,

but that's just them saying, "this is my spot."

If you think there's a miner that's doing better than you,

and if that happens to be a Chinese, Mexican, or other,

there's no one stopping you.

If you have more might, if you have more firepower,

you have more men, to take that claim.

And if there's resistance, there's violence.

Under Mexican rule,

California was a distant northern province

beyond government control.

Even in U.S. hands, it's still not a state.

There's no constitution, no courts, and no police.

Gangs run rampant in this lawless land.

Newspapers inflame readers

with tales of bandits and murderers.

The most famous of all, a Mexican gang leader

who goes by the name of Joaquin.

There's this murky region in between, where fact,

historical documentation, meets the legend.

There was a person named Joaquin murrieta

that people have identified.

We do know he's born around 1830

in a small town in son or a, Mexico.

Joaquin murrieta is one of many thousands

of Mexican miners in northern California

trying to make a go of it like everybody else,

panning for gold, digging for gold,